In this, the fourth installment in our short film series, Fairewinds Energy Education's Arnie Gundersen responds to questions we have received about cleanup at Fukushima Daiichi. Please consider supporting our work, so we can continue to bring you the truth about nuclear power.

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Hi. I’m Arnie Gundersen from Fairewinds. The Fairewinds crew has been getting a lot of emails lately about decommissioning Fukushima and comparing it to Chernobyl and to Three Mile Island. So I thought I’d use this short video to talk to you about the differences between those three reactors, all of whom had meltdowns. After the accident at Three Mile Island, human beings had entered the containment within one year of the time of the accident. And within six years of the time of the accident, the nuclear core had been completely removed, because while it had collapsed, it didn’t ever leave the nuclear reactor. At Chernobyl, things were different. The Russians built a complete building over top of the damaged nuclear reactor within six months of the nuclear accident. It’s called a sarcophagus. And when that sarcophagus was being built, Russians went into the reactor building and determined where the melted core was. They sent robots in and they were able to find something that’s now called the elephant’s foot. There’s about 100 tons of molten nuclear fuel underneath the nuclear reactor. This brings me to the reason for this video. There are huge differences between the dismantlement of Fukushima and the dismantlement of even something as bad as Chernobyl. And the difference is the groundwater. At Chernobyl, the groundwater never got in and got in direct contact with the nuclear fuel; whereas at Daiichi, the nuclear fuel is in contact with the groundwater because the groundwater has leaked into the bottom of the containment building and it’s gotten into other buildings that surround the containment. That makes Fukushima Daiichi must more expensive to solve and much more difficult to contain. The key is to keep the water out. And I’ve been saying this for 30 months now. The solution is not to pump water out of the containment, but to prevent the water from going in. What we need is an underground wall. Just like the sarcophagus covers the top of Chernobyl, we need an underground sarcophagus to prevent the groundwater from entering Fukushima reactors. I think once that’s accomplished, there’s no need to decommission these power plants and turn them back to the ground they are in. And the reason for that is that exposure to young, brave Japanese workers is going to be way to high for almost 100 years. Because of the explosions and because of the fact that the groundwater has moved parts of the nuclear fuel out into surrounding buildings, the risk to the workers is way too high. It’s time to contain the groundwater, cover up that site and walk away for 100 years. The Japanese government doesn’t want that to happen because they want their population to think that this is a solvable problem. It isn’t. The best thing for the Japanese to do is to admit that they’re going to have to live with radioactive rubble at the Fukushima site for over 100 years. We want to continue this type of reporting and analysis from Fairewinds. Please help us by joining our community through our indiegogo campaign and making a donation to our cause. Thank you. I’m Arnie Gundersen. I’ll keep you informed.